Roundup: Media's Take

Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess: Beyond Beijing, China's Toughest Competition

[About Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-founder and regular contributer to The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Red. His books include China's Brave New World (2007) and the forthcoming Global Shanghai, 1850-2010. Kate Merkel-Hess is the editor of The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Read, a graduate student in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, and a contributor t

Nick Meo: Georgia ... Roots of the South Ossetia conflict

[Nick Meo has written articles published in The Daily Telegraph (Foreign Correspondent), The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph.] For much of recorded history, the people of Georgia co-existed peacefully with their Ossetian neighbours, partly due to being under the thumb of Moscow since Tsarist troops conquered their lands in 1801. But the fall of the Soviet Union brought ambitious local politicians to power and unleashed bitter rivalries over territory, w

Jim Sleeper: Is Obama as Brave as His Black Memphis Supporters?

Last night, a 60%-black Memphis congressional district re-elected its one-term white liberal incumbent, Steve Cohen, despite TV ads by his black challenger Nikki Tinker that associated him falsely with the Klan and asked why Cohen would "pray in our churches" while voting against mandatory prayer in public schools. Cohen had won in 2006 with only 31% of the vote, probably because several black challengers split the remainder. But last night, given two years to prove himse

Jim Castagnera: Of Distant Mirrors, Immediate Omens, and Cautious Confidence

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. He is writing his 14th book, which is about the impact of terrorism on college campuses, for Praeger.] “Once Italy had collected the bullion of conquered lands and grown rich on the robbery; now money was migrating to the more industrialized… provinces, and Italy grew poorer while the rising wealth of Asia Minor forced the replacement of Rome with an Eastern capital.” So wrote

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: A Novel Approach to Politics

ABC News's political blog, "The Note," points out this week that Paris Hilton is issuing policy statements while John McCain nominates his wife for a topless beauty contest. The world's turned upside down. Who could blame a person for thinking that chronicling such oddness is beyond the skills of simple journalists? This is a job for the novelists.... ... Finally, here's one to send Ayn Rand spinning: The White House projects next year's federal budget deficit at a recor

Economist Editorial: Russian Intellectuals, the Hand that Feeds Them

THEY did not like each other much, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Russia’s liberal intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn, who in the West was considered its paramount flower, was as rude about it as he was about almost everything else. He refused to use the word intelligentsia, engineering instead the ugly and pejorative obrazovanshchina, roughly “educatedness”. The intelligentsia responded in kind: it paid tribute to his courage, read his works in samizdat but was spooked by his anti-Western attitude and re

Peggy Noonan: Political Cycles

You're in a plane and you're flying over the campaign at a level of about 10,000 feet, and you look down and see: Not much has changed. Battle lines fixed, topography the same, troops pretty much where they were. But land the plane, walk around and talk to people, and you realize: This thing is moving. Things are shifting around a bit. That's what I see looking back at the past four weeks. For the first time the idea began to take hold that John McCain can win this thin

Kevin Peraino: Israel's Separation Barrier Has Blocked West Bank Bombers, but May Be Creating a New Threat Within

Ghassan Abu Tir's favorite television series was a Turkish soap opera called "Noor." The 22-year-old East Jerusalem hard hat rarely missed an episode. The show's setting—a luxurious villa along the Bosporus—is about as far from cramped and conservative Jerusalem as one can get. Some evenings, the Palestinian backhoe driver would sit with his brother on the balcony of their grandparents' stone house, smoking L&Ms and trying to figure out how he could afford his own villa. The number

David S. Broder: A Way Back to the High Road for Obama, McCain?

The first question I asked John McCain and then Barack Obama was: How do you feel about the tone and direction of the campaign so far? No surprise. Both men pronounced themselves thoroughly frustrated by the personal bitterness and negativism they have seen in the two months since they learned they would be running against each other. "I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. "I think we could have avo

Sam Roberts: Rich as Mayor Bloomberg Is, New Yorkers Feel He Cares

Seven years ago, Michael R. Bloomberg brashly introduced himself to New Yorkers as a billionaire candidate for mayor. Since then, he has periodically upbraided them for expecting government to solve every problem. At times, he seemed to suggest that constituents bedeviled by adversity just get over it. Meanwhile, he graduated from a mere garden-variety billionaire to possibly the richest person in New York. But a funny thing has happened: A growing number of Mr. Bloomberg’s constit

Daniel Lak: The New China, Emerging from History's Humiliation

China's contemporary rise from insular poverty to emerging superpower has been meteoric. In the late 1970s, when senior leader Deng Xiaoping famously proclaimed, "to be rich is glorious," much of the country was poor, ravaged by recent history. Illiteracy was rampant, and few had access to television, radio, books or ideas beyond the thoughts of the late Mao Zedong. Today, it's safe to say Deng's aphorism is taken to heart by China's 1.3 billion people. Gettin

Jim Yardley: China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

As Beijing was starting construction on its main Olympic stadiums four years ago, China's vice president and leading political fixer, Zeng Qinghong, warned the 70 million members of the ruling Communist Party that the party itself could use some reconstruction. Zeng argued that the "painful lessons" from the collapse of other Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could not be ignored. He said China's cadres needed to "wake up" and realize that

Katia Bachko: Déjà Vu All Over Again ... Olympics coverage in 1980 and now

[Katia Bachko is a writer, editor, reporter and reader based in New York City.] The year was 1980, and the United States was boycotting the Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Correspondents from the USSR filed stories about the difficulty getting press accreditation, government restrictions on the media, the plight of the local populace and the removal of political dissidents from the cities. Fast forward 28 years, and dispatches fro

Asra Q. Nomani: You Still Can't Write About Muhammad

[Ms. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam"] Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,0

Mark Z. Barabak: Obama, McCain Find Race Issue Isn't Easily Discarded

Race has bedeviled this country from the start, when the Founding Fathers ducked the slavery issue for fear of killing the nation in its cradle. Obviously, much has changed. For one thing, Americans are seriously weighing the prospect of elevating a black man to the White House in November. But as this past week's debate over "the race card" illustrates, there is still no subject in American politics as fraught as the color of a candidate's skin.

Hillel Italie: Solzhenitsyn Changed Story of Soviet Union

[Hillel Italie is AP National Writer.] The legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn serves as a reminder that books can matter as much as life and death. Solzhenitsyn never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them. "Writers are a problem, they a

George Walden: How Chairman Mao led China to humiliation

[George Walden's book China: A Wolf in the World? is published this month.] The small dramas of the Olympics are tending to overshadow the historic event they symbolise: China's emergence from Maoist autarky and austerity to a great power, active in the world. How did we get here, in three short decades? Everyone knows about the 1962 Cuba crisis, but it was another near-nuclear war seven years later that did more to change the world, as I have particular reason to rem

John Pilger: The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

[John Pilger has been a war correspondent, film-maker and author.] When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met

Sidney Blumenthal: The Strange Death of Republican America

On July 29, President George W. Bush appeared at the Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio, where he spoke about energy and then asked the audience for questions. The opportunity for people in a small town in the Midwest to pose a question directly to the president of the United States is a rare one, possibly a once in a lifetime experience. "And now I'd like to answer some questions, if you have any," said Bush. But his request was returned with silence. Bush filled the air with an

Jon Meacham: The South Just Ain't That Different Anymore

In a self-interview entitled "Questions They Never Asked Me," Walker Percy once unleashed the frustrations of years of sitting for interviews, particularly with journalists from outside his native South. "Of all the things I'm fed up with, I think I'm fed up most with hearing about the New South," Percy wrote. Why is that? he asked himself. "I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again … If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about t